With World Read Aloud Day just around the corner, it’s not too late to use your technological resources to enhance your celebration and bring reading to life for your students. Here are seven ways to do just that!

1. Guest Readers & Audiences – Using Skype, iChat, Facetime or other applications, classes can bring in virtual guest readers. Guest readers come in all shapes and sizes. LitWorld and Kate Messner both provided a list of published authors who are willing to Skype with students on WRAD, which you can find at – LitWorld.org/WorldReadAloudDayChats – KateMessner.com/skype-with-an-author-on-world-read-aloud-day-2012 Yet, guest readers can also be students’ parents or grandparents, volunteers from local businesses or organizations, or even students and teachers at other schools. If you would like to connect with other educators who are interested in Skyping for WRAD, visit this wiki created by John Schu and Shannon Miller – ChangeTheWorldStoryByStory.wikispaces.com/Skype+Schedules+and+Projects. By the way, don’t miss out on the opportunity to allow your own students to serve as the Guest Readers for other classes or schools as well!

2. Podcasting – Get your students excited about reading by using voice-recording applications to record themselves reading aloud. Vocaroo.com or the Voice Memos app on various iDevices are simple ways to implement this… or use a more robust program like Audacity, Aviary or Garageband, which would even allow students to add mood music or sound effects to their productions. Play these finished masterpieces for the class or publish them online to share with others!

3. Talking Avatars – Using the voice recording function at Voki.com, students can use their voices to create an avatar that can read aloud to the class. Whether Abraham Lincoln is reading the Gettysburg Address or a cat is reading Carl Sandburg’s famous Fog poem, this activity will delight students of all ages. Bonus: Students can read their own poems and compositions aloud as well! Check out this elementary Voki project by Samantha Lewis that promotes literacy and writing through Dr. Seuss inspired rhyming poems.

4. Voicethread – Voicethread is a dynamic digital media tool that will allow your students to write or record comments. For World Read Aloud Day, create a Voicethread with slides for various figures of speech or genres and allow your students to read aloud to audio or video record examples that they discover in literary works. (Learn more about this tool’s potential at Voicethread.com.)

5. Digital Storytelling – To celebrate both reading and writing, consider allowing the students to create Digital Storybooks using the Web 2.0 application, Little Bird Tales. This application allows students to compose a written piece, draw original illustrations and record themselves reading the book aloud. Best of all, they are easy to share with the class, e-mail to parents or paste on your class website.

6. Puppet Shows or Reader’s Theater – Lights! Camera! Action! Bring reading to life with a little drama! Use your document camera to create live or recorded Read Alouds of Reader’s Theater or other works with engaging images of student-created popsicle stick avatars, finger puppets or other manipulatives. For example, read Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar with a large popsicle stick avatar of the caterpillar and real versions of the red apple, two green pears, a cupcake, a single leaf and more.

7. Video Book Reviews – Students can use a webcam, Flipcam or Doc Cam to record a review of a favorite book, including sharing illustrations and reading their favorites passages aloud. Bonus: Upload these video book reviews online and connect their URLs to QR codes (qrcode.kaywa.com) that can be printed and affixed to the cover of the book for other students to watch throughout the school year!

Using Technology, you can easily use your World Read Aloud Day event to ignite a passion for reading in your students and allow it to spread far beyond your classroom walls.

World Read Aloud Day takes place on Wednesday, March 7th. For more ideas, activities resources, visit LitWorld.org/WorldReadAloudDayActivities. You can even download their original picture book, New Day, New Friends, to share with your class!

McKeel Elementary Academy loves our Ladibug Document Cameras! Here’s how we used them to enhance our participation in World Read Aloud Day 2011.

During the week prior to the event, 3rd-5th grade gifted students composed original poetry and designed pop-up illustrations to go with them. On World Read Aloud Day, students used Garageband to create mp3s of themselves reading their creative poems aloud. Then, we used our Ladibug 3D Document Camera to share the poems and illustrations on our interactive white board (and screen capture the images) in both 2D and 3D! Finally, the students collected the pieces into a Pop-Up Poetry anthology using iMovie… which will be shared with the whole school – and you!

This was our first time creating with the Ladibug 3D document camera and here is a snapshot of their work! My students LOVE hearing feedback from their online audience, so please let us know what you think.

Over the last couple weeks, we had a very exciting “contest” in my 3rd-5th grade project-based learning classes. Students invented ice cream flavors…. and we are actually going to make the winning one in class tomorrow!

Here’s what we did!
1. Students brainstormed 9 new ice creams, including a name, the flavor of the ice cream itself, and the toppings inside of it.
2. Next, students evaluated their 9 choices to choose the best one to submit to the contest.
3. Students then used Garageband and the online podcasting tutorial to create a “radio commercial” with music, voices, effects, jingles, and/or slogans to “sell” their new ice cream idea. When completed, students exported their commercials as an mp3. (Want more info? Need a Garageband alternative? Click here!)
4. Students created a criteria for evaluating/judging the ice cream radio commercials to pick the winner. They decided on scoring the commercials based on these three criteria, each on a scale of 1-5:
– The (potential) taste of the invented ice cream.
– The overall quality of the commercial.
– The persuasiveness of the commercials.
5. Each students created a chart and listened to all of the commercials, evaluating each one according to the three criteria and then submitting their scores.
6. All of the scores are tabulated and averaged out…. and this week we are making the winning flavor!!

Welcome!

Welcome to Engaging Education, a collection of resources and ideas that aim to engage our students and help them reach their full potential... as well as engage us as educators in the principles behind what we do every day. I hope you find them helpful, thought-provoking, and time-saving.
Enjoy!

Follow Me

ISTE 2015

Categories

Featured Posts

A Coming-of-Digital Age Story By Nancye Blair Black Performed by Laney Blair Used to be, learning at school was a bore. Textbooks and textbooks and textbooks. Snore! In class, teachers would talk, students would hear. It was the same old story year after year. Until one day, our principal suddenly appeared With a class set […]

Something “eco-lutionary” is cropping up at schools across the country. While some students might be experiencing the start of the new academic year from behind a desk, others are embracing an expansive sense of classroom that reaches far beyond the schoolhouse walls and into the green. At our public charter school, Lakeland Montessori Middle School, […]

“Beyond waiting “To Grow Up” For too long, our students have worked tirelessly for an audience of one: their teacher. When class assignments assume that work is simply preparation for some future “real world,” this singular audience makes sense. But in the course of a 21st century school year, if a class of students never […]

What should a good citizen do? The question of “what a good citizen should do” in a democratic society begins with an assumption of a universal ethical imperative within democracy. Perhaps this follows from the concept of democracy itself. At the onset of American independence, the writers of the Declaration stated that it was self-evident […]

August 31, 2012. Today would be 142nd birthday of revolutionary Italian physician and educator, Maria Montessori. To celebrate, Montessori alums at Google displayed a Google doodle of traditional Montessori learning manipulatives on their homepage. That’s right – both Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, grew up as Montessori kids. What’s more, it […]